During this period, preceding the Chinese New Year celebration, a lot of people are traveling in crowded trains and buses, often with live chickens aboard.
On Tuesday, authorities in Hong Kong were culling 20,000 birds at the territory’s wholesale market, suffocating them with carbon dioxide in plastic bags. Neighboring Shanghai will halt live poultry trading for three months starting Friday, this week, which is the first day of the traditional Chinese vacancy. From February 15, live poultry trading will be halted in the coastal Zhejang province, where 49 people have been infected and 12 have died this year due to the bird flu.
The H7N9 virus was first time found in imported poultry in Hong Kong. In the last weekend, a second human case infected with a new strain of bird flu, H10N8, was confirmed in the Jiangxi province. The infected 55 year old woman was in a critical condition. A 73 year old woman, the first infected with this new bird flu virus, died in December.
